His life was utterly different from Haydn’s. To begin with, he was twenty-four years younger. He was most carefully and rigorously trained in his art, from infancy, by his father and by the greatest musicians in the world, whom he met on his triumphant tours over Europe. As a child he was all but adored in Vienna, in all the great cities of Italy, in London, in Paris, and in Brussels. As a youth fortune began to forsake him. He was not so much neglected as unappreciated. He was underpaid, harassed by debt. He was without an established position, chiefly apparently because in the nature of things he could not be but young. He died at last in Vienna, in more or less miserable circumstances, at the age of thirty-five. Thus a life could end that in early years had been the marvellous delight of nearly a whole world. He was always a virtuoso as well as a composer. He played the violin excellently; he played the piano as no man in his time could play it and as perhaps no man has played it since. His playing was not so much distinguished by brilliance as by beauty. The quality of his tone was of that kind which once heard can never be forgotten. It haunted the minds of men long after he was dead. Even the memory of it brought tears. His compositions give only a slight idea of what the range of his playing was. He seems to have moved people most at times when he improvised. This he would often do in public, according to the custom of the day; but in private, too, he would often go to his piano and pour his soul out hour after hour through the night in improvised music of strange and unusual power. Something of the quality of these outpourings seems to have been preserved in the fantasia in C minor. The sonatas and rondos have little of it. Neither have the concertos. Franz Niemetschek, one of his most devoted friends and author of the first of his biographies, said, as an old man, that if he dared ask the Almighty for one more earthly joy, it would be that he might once again before he died hear Mozart improvise. The improvisations of Beethoven, marvellous as they were, never took just the place of Mozart’s in the minds of those who had been privileged to hear the younger man as well.